Long before the rise of advertising, branding, and social media, empires understood that power had to be seen before it could be believed. Armando Minjárez Monárrez: En Cuerpo Presente explores how images become instruments of power. Monuments, rituals, architecture, souvenirs, advertisements, and brands across history have shaped not only how we see one another, but how we come to understand ourselves. Images do not simply reflect identity; they sanction it, circulate it, and assign value to it. 

Rather than treating identity as something fixed or inherited, Minjárez Monárrez thinks of it as a cultural architecture constructed through images, memory, performance, and display. His sculptures inhabit the space between monument and commodity, artifact and souvenir, humor and critique. They resist fixed definitions of identity, not by offering alternative images, but by exposing the systems that produce them. If every society builds monuments to the stories it wants people to believe, En Cuerpo Presente asks what kinds of monuments we continue to build today, and what they ask us to believe about ourselves. 

 WAM’s Naftzger Family Regional Creatives exhibition series is dedicated to exhibiting art by local artists. This program is a partnership with Harvester Arts, a local nonprofit art organization fostering opportunities for Wichita creatives. Their core values of experimentation, capacity building, and community engagement are a framework for this partnership, which includes this exhibition space and programming with local creatives, including performances, talks, and pop-up experiences.